What It's All About

Greetings, my name is Khanh Tran, and I built this website because I believe that in our current education on Structural Engineering at UCSD that ethics is not emphasized nearly enough.  In my personal experience, the only time that ethics was emphasized was in a single chapter in our introductory course.

I’m not claiming to be an expert on the field or even the perfect student.  If you are a professional already out in the field and know its inner workings, this is not for you.   What I am is a student just like you that has gone through a good portion of the classes offered here at UCSD, which gives me good insight into what we really study.  Those of you who will find this site useful are my fellow students, whether you are an incoming freshman looking into the field or an undergraduate already studying Structural Engineering.  What I can give you is a new perspective on engineering that emphasizes ethics.

From my own experience being surrounded by the other SE students, the general consensus is that we focus much more on the technical aspects of the field: what is the problem and what is the most efficient solution.  Rarely do we ever discuss how the ethics factor in.  At the most, the conversation covers whether the plan is safe enough, but not to extent of how each party is morally affected. 

What this website allows us to do is to have an in depth discussion on specific examples of ethical decision making as well as the effect of a lack of ethics.  I personally analyze two real world examples using a four-step process that I learned from Dr. Lelli Van Den Einde in SE 1.  If you want detailed information on what this process entails, you can access it in the tab above.

I hope what I have to say in these blogs helps to inspire you to think of engineering from a new standpoint.  Ethics is seldom emphasized in our education but always necessary in our work.  The issue of balancing safety and profit is ever-present in any engineering project.  By looking into actual events from an ethical view and using the four-step process, I encourage you to really develop your own ethical judgment.  Ultimately, I hope that my website inspires you to focus more on the importance of ethics in the engineering field.